1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to providing authorization services with external authentication.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the impact of the Internet continues to alter the economic landscape, companies are experiencing a fundamental shift in how they do business. Business processes involve complex interactions between companies and their customers, suppliers, partners, and employees. For example, businesses interact constantly with their customers—often other businesses—to provide information on product specification and availability. Businesses also interact with vendors and suppliers in placing orders and obtaining payments. Businesses must also make a wide array of information and services available to their employee populations, generating further interactions. To meet the new challenges and leverage opportunities, while reducing their overall cost-of-interactions, many organizations are migrating to network-based business processes and models. Among the most important of these is Internet-based E-business.
To effectively migrate their complex interactions to an Internet-based E-business environment, organizations must contend with a wide array of challenges and issues. For example, businesses need to securely provide access to business applications and content for users they deem authorized. This implies that businesses need to be confident that unauthorized use is prevented.
To meet the needs of the E-business environment, products have been introduced that provide various E-business services. For example, some products provide authentication services, some provide authorization services, some provide identity management services, etc. Users have to configure these often disparate system to work together. The integration of these different systems is difficult and often unsuccessful. To remedy this problem, vendors offer integrated solutions that include multiple services in one package. For example, products are available that authenticate and authorize users to access various content.
While the integrated solutions have satisfied many E-businesses, there are some who want many of the services of an integrated solution, but wish to continue using a legacy authentication system.